Longtime trustee seeking another term on BSD board

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This article was published 05/10/2022 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After representing the Brandon School Division’s board of trustees for almost three decades, Linda Ross said she believes she has enough gas in the tank for at least four more years.

Ross is one of seven current BSD trustees who are vying to retain their seat in the Oct. 26 municipal election, although she sets herself apart from the pack by being the longest-serving member of the board.

Ross began her tenure on the board in 1993, citing her kids as a major reason for taking the plunge.

Even though her children aged out of the division a long time ago, Ross has stuck around in this role to help shape local policy and programming, having witnessed the seismic impacts such decisions have on the community firsthand.

“Education is the most important thing that we can do to change lives. Maybe that sounds corny, but it is the most important thing,” she told the Sun on Monday. “We can overcome all kinds of adverse circumstances with education.”

To Ross, her 29 years of experience on the board make her an invaluable asset when it comes to securing the well-being of public education, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and other unprecedented threats to the system.

Throughout the past term, some of these significant challenges have come from the provincial government in the form of new legislation and economic strategies that, in Ross’ view, are not in the best interests of students, parents and staff.

One of these changes was outlined in the Education Modernization Act (Bill 64), which sought to remove individual English-language school boards and centralize all the major decision-making through Winnipeg.

While the BSD board was vocal in its opposition to Bill 64, Ross was pleasantly surprised to see how outspoken Manitobans at large were about this piece of legislation, sparking a public backlash that led to the bill’s death last fall.

“I thought school boards were going to be a thing of the past by now, and I’m really pleased that they aren’t, because I think that having those local voices is really, really important,” she said.

“We can’t have a government sitting on Broadway [in Winnipeg] addressing the specific needs of every educational community in Manitoba. Because they don’t know what all of those needs are.”

However, Ross remains wary of the province’s meddling in local affairs, especially since the province has frozen school boards’ ability to collect property taxes, thereby making the division increasingly reliant on government funding for support.

“My concern with all of the funding coming from the provincial government is that there is no one-size-fits-all [solution],” Ross said. “There are things that are particular to individual communities that need to be addressed and there needs to be some mechanism … available to address those local concerns.”

Despite all these hurdles, Ross is proud of the work the current school board had spearheaded over the past couple years and wants to help move these initiatives along if she is re-elected later this month.

One of Ross’ proudest accomplishments throughout this term was helping put a larger emphasis on equity, diversity and inclusion within the division, crediting fellow trustee Calistus Ekenna for bringing the issue to the board’s attention.

“We are starting to collect some data on our teachers and our staff, looking at the number of people we are employing from various ethnic minorities and so on,” Ross said.

“Kids in school need to be able to see people like them in those leadership roles. So that’s an issue we really need to address.”

For a prospective 2022-26 term, Ross wants to continue to provide high-quality education across the division, which means keeping schools safe, class sizes small and resources plentiful for the growing diversity of student needs in Brandon.

And while Ross has heard the criticism that long-standing members of the BSD school board should step aside to make way for new trustees, she believes her knowledge and experience provides a sense of stability that is needed during these tumultuous times.

“If we had a brand-new board of all nine trustees, that would be a very difficult situation. Because people wouldn’t have the knowledge of how the system works, some of the issues that we’ve encountered in the past, some of the things we’ve tried that work, that didn’t work,” she said.

“So I think we need a combination of new people and … experienced [trustees]. I think you need to have that mixture.”

Ross, who joined Brandon University’s department of psychology in 1987 as an assistant professor, currently serves as acting dean of BU’s faculty of health sciences.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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